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here are two mes, says my husband. The light-filled, laughing, open, people-person me – so full of love it sometimes feels uncontainable; and the other me, drawn like a crazy cartoonish magnet to all of life’s niggling uncertainty and darkness. I know it’s normal to be negative at times, and that life will not always be golden. I’m not seeking gold – the rainbow is glorious enough – but, too often, the colour of life is drained away by the non-living stuff– the ironing pile, the layer of dust, the creeping overdraft… too many arguments, too many ‘it’ll be better tomorrows’. It’s that old definition of madness: doing the same thing, over and over again, expecting a different result.
What happened though, was not some seismic shift from dark to light, it was a gradual opening of my mind and the acknowledgement of the things that simply weren’t serving me, or anyone, least of all those I love. Instead of reacting to the symptom, I learned to open up my mind to the root cause – learning to feel beyond the frayed temper, skin rash, period pain – and unearth what was really going on beneath it all. What was I missing? While reading Rachel Abrams’s book BodyWise (Pan Macmillan, £12.99), many of the real-life stories stuck with me. Breakouts that warned women offthe wrong men; migraines that came on only at work in a thankless job… Then, Traditional Chinese Medicine For Women, by Xiaolan Zhao (Little, Brown £12.99), with countless examples of women who’d long-ignored their latent emotions, only to see the problem surfacing within their bodies instead. My hands, which broke out in biblical boils several months ago, were my sign. ‘Down tools’ were my editor’s words, so I did. I pressed pause on a dozen ‘very important’ things and realised none of them was crucial to my survival or wellbeing. I met Katie Brindle, a doctor of Chinese medicine and founder of The Hayo’u Method, and listened as she explained what my hands were ‘telling’ me.